Tim
O'Brien has been thinking lately about My Lai how those two words still haunt America,
even as they've lost meaning to so many Americans. Just last month, O'Brien
mentioned the My Lai massacre, in passing, while talking to a class of
university students about the Vietnam War. It shocked him that no one in the
room had heard of it.

"It
got me thinking about what's happening in history classes, and just in ordinary
discourse in our country," says O'Brien…."To me, it would be a little
bit like a Texan never having heard of the Alamo. Or somebody
living in Montana never having heard of the Little Big Horn. Or someone
living in Massachusetts never having heard of the (Boston) Tea Party, or the
American Revolution — events both critical to American history and exposing the
flaws in America's own past."

In
this requiem to My Lai - the Vietnamese village where, in March 1968, American
soldiers massacred 504 citizens - Morley Safer describes a place haunted by
those killings. Morley says that while local farmers still tend the rice
paddies in My Lai, no one lives there anymore.

Larry
Colburn and Hugh Thompson, members of an Army helicopter crew, risked their
lives in 1968 to save Vietnamese civilians from American GIs during the My Lai
massacre. Now, Colburn and Thompson return to My Lai with Mike Wallace to meet
the survivors.

Four Hours in My Lai is a 1989 television documentary made by
the British Yorkshire Television, concerning the 1968 My Lai massacre by the
U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. The programme was
broadcast on ITV as part of Yorkshire Television's First Tuesday documentaries,
which broadcast on the first Tuesday of every month. The documentary is
narrated by Mark Halliley.

In
an exploration of the morality of actions taken in the name of war, AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE directs its lens to the 1968 My Lai massacre and asks what drove a
company of American soldiers to commit the worst atrocity in American military
history? Were they "just following orders" or, did they crumble under
the pressure of a vicious war in which the line between enemy soldier and
civilian had been intentionally blurred?

What
drove a company of American soldiers -- ordinary young men deployed to liberate
a small foreign nation from an oppressive neighbor -- to murder more than 500
unarmed Vietnamese civilians? Were they "just following orders," as
some later declared? Or, as others argued, did they break under the pressure of
a misguided military strategy that measured victory by body count?

Today,
as the United States once again finds itself questioning the morality of
actions taken in the name of war, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Barak
Goodman ("The Lobotomist,"
"Scottsboro: An American Tragedy") focuses his lens on the 1968 My
Lai massacre, its subsequent cover-up and the heroic efforts of the soldiers
who broke rank to halt the atrocities.

"This
film includes imagery that may not be appropriate for younger or more sensitive
viewers. Viewer discretion is advised."

I
just viewed images of American soldiers torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners.
My first thought was, "Is this the My Lai of Iraq?" On March 16,
1968, in the village of My Lai, Vietnam, a group of American soldiers, under
the command of platoon leader Lt. William Calley, killed several hundred Vietnamese
civilians, including women and children. A witness to this turned them in. A
year later, charges were brought against Calley and his troops. He was
sentenced to prison, and was released after only a few years.

The
film, shot largely in black and white, features testimony by soldiers who
participated in or witnessed atrocities in Vietnam, including the killing of
civilians, including children; mutilation of bodies; indiscriminate razing of
villages; throwing prisoners out of helicopters; and other acts of cruelty
towards Vietnamese civilians and combatants. Some participants also claimed
that these acts reflected orders from higher-up officers. A number of soldiers
are quoted stating that their military training failed to include instruction
in the terms of the Geneva Convention, while others state that the dangers they
faced as soldiers created an environment in which they regarded all Vietnamese
as hostile "gooks" and stopped seeing them as human beings.

In
testimony by Joseph Bangert, he describes traveling
in a "truckload of grunt Marines" when "there were some
Vietnamese children at the gateway of the village and they gave the old finger
gesture at us. It was understandable that they picked this up from GIs there.
They stopped the trucks -- they didn't stop the truck, they slowed down a
little bit, and it was just like response, the guys got up, including the
lieutenants, and just blew all the kids away. There were about five or six kids
blown away, and then the truck just continued down the hill."